Burnout and Scope Creep: Lessons from VulnHunter
How adding 'just one more feature' almost killed a 6-month side project.
When I built VulnHunter AI, the initial scope was simple: parse ASTs and pass them to an LLM.
Two months in, I decided it needed a VS Code extension. Then a GitHub App integration. Then a custom diff-viewer built in React.
By month four, I hadn't shipped a single thing. I was exhausted, the codebase was fragmented, and the core value proposition (the static analysis engine) was neglected.
The Lesson: Scope creep is a silent killer. If you are building a solo project, ruthless prioritization is your only defense against burnout. Ship the core feature. Let users tell you what else they need. You are usually wrong about what they want anyway.
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